Full Circle

Editor's Note

When Agent0002 first asked me to do this whole Editor's Note thing, my first thought was, Oh dear, she has no idea how much I'll probably write for this... So I sent her a link to the 2,655-word-long blog post I once made on Wikia about how I discovered Odd Squad to prove my point. The fact that you're reading this E/N today shows she didn't care. :)

I will be the first to admit, the moment she first mentioned to me back in early May of 2016 that she was considering writing a fanfic based on Ships Ahoy!, the alarm bells went off in my mind. A few years ago, a younger and more naive me had gotten mixed up in another fandom where this crazy stalker chick decided to write 50 bajillion oneshots using my canon and my OCs, and to this day I'm still working my rear end off to clean that mess up. So even though Agent0002 had been nothing but pleasant in her reviews of Ships Ahoy! (SA) and our occasional PM conversations at the time, I wasn't exactly thrilled. The last thing I needed was a repeat of my online plagiarism nightmare.

Nevertheless I tried to be pleasant. I offered to beta-read if she ever got around to writing this fanfic, but otherwise brushed the idea off like it didn't mean much to me. Still, I answered her questions about my story thoughtfully and truthfully—most of which had to do with the finer details of my fanfiction, whether I could picture Olive and Oscar attempting a more serious relationship (to which I decided no, they'd probably have to leave the squad and grow up into adults), and whether the release of "O is Not For Over" would affect how I'd end SA (to which I firmly answered no, I was still going with my original plan—not telling her I'd known about the plot to OINFO for several months and had already planned on having Olive and Oscar break up ;) ). We also analyzed episodes/characters and chatted randomly about the show/actors/fandom and made plenty of jokes, and over the next couple months I unwittingly came to trust her as a sort of penpal, more than just a fan of my work.

And then, on July 5, the day "Oscar Strikes Back" first aired, I got this message from her:

"In light of Oscar's being made president (let's be honest, his being written out of the show) it now makes writing fanfiction involving him, along with Olive and Otto, infinitely easier. No stinking canon to come blast a hole in your ship or something. So I've been thinking more strongly about writing an odd squad fanfiction. What I'd like to know is if I were to write a (well written, age appropriate) fanfiction involving Olive and Oscar getting back together later on (and I'm talking much later, I mean maybe back together as friends sooner, but years [decades, centuries?] later for a true boyfriend/girlfriend relationship) would you approve of it? And yes, I know I don't have to get your approval for any of this, but if it's based on your canon I'd really like to have your approval for it. If not, that's completely fine and I'll just drop that idea :) note, I'm not saying that I will, but hypothetically speaking?"

I was wary, but intrigued. I was flattered, but patronizing. She'd sure been listening when I said Olive and Oscar would have to leave Odd Squad before their relationship could become more serious, but hadn't I broken them up for a reason? They were supposed to stay that way, they weren't supposed to ever get back together. Not in my canon, at least. And why was she so insistent on using my story canon? Why not make up her own about Olive and Oscar, I'd read that for sure and still find it cute! So I had mixed feelings, but in the end I figured, Eh, she doesn't seem like the crazy stalker type. She writes a short story, I'll make sure she knows they're not supposed to get back together in my canon, and it can't do any harm. With this patronizing attitude, I gave her a thumbs-up and a green light to write that fanfiction, with a minor suggestion to maybe wait until the Odd Squad Movie came out to see what Olive, Otto, and Oscar would be up to in there.

After that I didn't hear much from Agent0002 for the rest of July, except for the occasional conversation about the new Season 2 characters and theories about where Otis came from and how Oona made tons of 80s references. With vacation plans and college preparations underway on my end, I completely forgot about her fanfic aspirations.